Tuesday, April 26. 2011

Recently I became aware that all H-1B salary data is is publicly available on the Internet. You can get a very detailed Access database of the salary information and there is even a very nifty web application that allows you to quickly search for whatever salary data you are interested in. Now, these figures are probably the best available resource for figuring out how your salary compares to that of your peers. Unlike salary information from sites like Glassdoor, this salary data is not self-reported but directly taken from H-1B visa proceedings making the salary figures much more truthful.

I had already played around with the web application a few weeks ago and uncovered a few interesting pieces of data (mostly related to information security jobs, the field I am working in) which I posted on my Twitter but until today I had not had time to actually do further analysis with the Access database.

The first thing I tried was to search for the highest average salaries in the database. I applied additional filters like only counting job titles for each company that had at least three granted H-1B visas for each listed position (to remove outliers like CEOs on H-1B visas making millions of dollars, for example). I also aggregrated all statistics over the minimum salary specified for each position in the database. Originally I wanted to work with the maximum salary field but apparently this field is optional and not many positions have it listed. Still, I know that at least for my position (I am in the database too) the maximum salary field gives the amount of money I am really making. To make things simpler for me I also only considered salaries given per year and discarded those given per hour.